Customer Success - Why and How of Gainsight's 14 Elements

DAN STEINMAN
General Manager
Gainsight EMEA
STATE OF
CUSTOMER
SUCCESS

CUSTOMER SUCCESS
DRIVES SALES1

Your prospects are
talking to your customers

CUSTOMER SUCCESS
IS A COMPANY-WIDE
PRIORITY
2

It’s a top-down,
company-wide
commitment

IF CUSTOMER SUCCESS
REMAINS JUST
A DEPARTMENT,
YOU WILL FAIL

Customer Success - Why and How of Gainsight's 14 Elements

We’re not really all that different

We just need
a common
language

PERIODIC TABLE OF CUSTOMER
SUCCESS ELEMENTS

Translated into Japanese and Portuguese
“…more than 2 years after
publication. It’s unusual for a
book to sell so consistently at this
point in its life– most books have
flamed out by this point.”
Maria Martinez
50,000+ COPIES SOLD

Easton Taylor
Director of Customer
Success, EMEA
The Why & How Gainsight’s 14
Elements

Insights & Actions
Turn data into meaningful actions
across your team
Outcomes
Proactively deliver customer
outcomes at scale
Transform
Rally your entire company around
the mission of customer success
Stages of Customer Success Maturity

© Copyright 2017, Gainsight, Inc., All rights reserved
REACTIVE
Manage escalations on a
case-by-case basis
INSIGHTS & ACTIONS
across your team
OUTCOMES
outcomes at scale
TRANSFORMATION
Rally your entire company around the
mission of customer success
80%
87%
89%
93%
Gross Retention
Chief Customer Officer Summit Benchmark Survey,
2018

REACTIVE
Manage escalations on a
case-by-case basis
INSIGHTS & ACTIONS
across your team
OUTCOMES
outcomes at scale
TRANSFORMATION
Rally your entire company around the
mission of customer success
Chief Customer Officer Summit Benchmark Survey,
2018
Net Retention
92%
106%
113%
125%

The Periodic Table of Customer Success Elements
Lm
2
Lifecycle
Management
Cv
1
360° Customer
View
Ch
3
Customer Health
Cx
4
Experience
Management
Ae
12
Advocate
Engagement
Su
13
Support
Experience
Pr
11
Product Success
Se
14
Services
Experience
Am
5
Adoption
Management
Sa
8
Stakeholder
Alignment
Re
9
Risk Escalation
Em
7
Expansion
Management
Sp
10
Success Planning
Rm
6
Renewal
Management
INSIGHTS & ACTIONS OUTCOMES TRANSFORMATION

Elements Definitions Series
360o Customer View
Cv360o
Customer
View
1

Impact
Retention
Efficiency
CV Element Overview
Gainsight Strategy
Aggregate key customer data
into a holistic view
The 360o Customer View Element will provide you with a single source of truth for all of
your customer information
Pain Point
Data is spread across a
number of disparate
systems resulting in no easy
or fast way to understand a
customer

Our customer data is spread across disparate systems, so
understanding a customer is a difficult and slow process
• It’s hard for our teams to collaborate on a customer
• It takes lots of time to prepare for customer interactions
• Our employees have inconsistent or even conflicting information
about a customer
▪ Different systems disagree on the facts of a customer
▪ Notes are in unshared applications, are disorganized, and go away
when an employee transfers off a customer
The Pain

Aggregate key customer data into a single source to provide a holistic
view that enables the entire organization to do better work
• Capture key information across teams (e.g., sales, success, support,
services) and types of data (e.g., product usage, interactions)
• Provide a single and actionable view of customer health
• Give each team insights into relevant business relationships, products,
and service engagements
• Share insights directly with customers via automated exports and
access to live reports
The Strategy

• Improve efficiency by reducing the time spent gathering
information for a consistent and holistic view of the customer
• Improve retention by providing impactful context to all customer-
facing teams
• Create a better customer experience by ensuring all customer-
facing teams are up-to-date on the most relevant customer
interactions
The Impact

Lm
2
Lifecycle
Management
Lifecycle Management

Impact
Retention
Efficiency
LM Element Overview
Gainsight Strategy
Define the customer experience
across the lifecycle and reinforce
a consistent experience through
outreach and visibility
The Lifecycle Management Element will help you create a consistent customer journey
across all customer segments and lifecycle stages
Pain Point
No consistent customer
engagement and experience
across all stages of the
lifecycle

We engage with our customers haphazardly, and the checklists we do
have tend to do things to the customer without necessarily getting
them additional value
• Inconsistent experience from customer to customer, even on key
steps like EBRs
• Unclear customer expectations and handoffs
• Repetitive manual actions
• Similar experiences, regardless of customer segment
• Customers get only what they ask for, not what we know most
customers need
The Pain

Establish a consistent customer journey
• Define the experience for each customer segment in onboarding and
while live
• Drive each critical milestone in the customer journey, each “Moment
of Truth”, with human or automated outreach
• Reinforce a consistent experience through visibility into customer
progress, and focusing the team on achieving the intended outcome
for the customer’s business at each key moment in the customer
journey
The Strategy

Your customer journey is defined by Moments of Truth (MoT). A MoT is a ‘make-or-
break’ situation, where a customer commits to the outcome emotionally, taking it as a
sign of whether their partnership with you will be successful
A MoT is:
• How the customer would describe the experience to a friend
• What the customer gets out of or learns from the experience
Then define what your organization does to support that MoT and who does it
Tips
• Your MoT should have nothing to do with your product or your needs -- it would still
make sense to the customer, even if they had bought a competitor’s product
• If this is your first time defining your MoTs, start small. Identify just a few.
Constructing a complete customer journey is a valuable, but massive, project.
The Strategy

The Strategy
The Delivery
Medium
Evaluation Onboarding Live
The customer journey is peppered with Moments of Truth. Create the experience for each.
The Message
The
Recipient Customize by
customer segment

The Strategy
The Delivery
Medium
The Message
The
Recipient
● Human-led vs Digital-led
● Features and workflow
● Accountability
● Seamless cross-functional work
● Tracking
● Iterative improvement
Effective delivery requires both technical and organizational components

• Increase retention by delivering a consistent and seamless customer
experience
• Increase efficiency by standardizing and streamlining execution on
Moments of Truth
The Impact

Customer Health
Ch
3
Customer Health

CH Element Overview
Gainsight Strategy
Set up scorecard measures that
are shared across the
organization
Impact
Retention
Expansion
Advocacy
The Customer Health Element provides a consistent and shared view of where you are (or
are not) providing your customers with value and positive experiences, equipping you to
increase retention, expansion and advocacy
Pain Point
No consistent and cross-functional
way to identify and visualize data-
driven measures of customer
health

We do not have a consistent way to identify and visualize data-
driven measures of customer health
• Often oversimplification of customer health into one metric, or so
many metrics of customer health that our team disagrees on
which to trust or to use to take action
• Spotty, hard-to-get, or absent information about our customers’
outcomes and experience
The Pain

Set up scorecard measures for both Outcomes Health and
Experience Health
• Track outcomes using the DEAR framework—deployment,
engagement, adoption and ROI—to define, capture, and visualize
the health of their outcomes
• Track experience using the ‘listening posts’ established in the
Expansion Management Element (CX)
• Identify high-risk and successful customers, to prioritize and
shape interactions with them
The Strategy

• Granular scores provide detail and insight into what actions to
trigger to generate more value for the customer (see Adoption
Management Element)
• Increase retention by engaging at-risk customers (see Adoption
Management Element)
• Increase expansion by targeting healthy customers who may be
candidates for upsells and cross-sells (see Expansion Management
Element)
• Increase advocacy by leveraging healthy customers (through the
Advocate Engagement Element)
The Impact

Renewal Management
RmRenewal
Management
6

RM Element Overview
Gainsight Strategy
Use CTAs to build a renewals
process that provides visibility
and predictability
Impact
Retention
The Renewal Management Element will help you set up and execute a best-in-class
renewals process and accurately forecast renewals
Pain Point
No clear process for
managing and forecasting
renewals, which negatively
impacts GRR and NRR

We are reactive in our approach to renewals and each Renewal Lead handles renewals in their
own way, both leading to inaccurate and non-predictive forecasts, which negatively impact
our GRR and NRR
• Each renewal is handled differently and manually, especially when coordinating across
functions, so we can’t rely on consistent execution and it’s hard for us to scale up
• There are at-risk renewals, but we don’t know which accounts they are or how to engage
them effectively
• We can’t rely on our forecast to adjust business targets and strategies
▪ It’s unclear which renewals are upcoming
▪ It’s unclear how we’re tracking towards our goals and forecast
▪ It’s unclear how at-risk renewals should affect our forecast, whether we’re forecasting
near-term or into future quarters
The Pain

Implement a prioritization-enabled renewals process to provide visibility and
predictability, help build reliable forecasts, and ensure a scalable and consistent approach
• Decide on best practices, including cross-functional strategies and processes, and hold
your team to executing them
• Adopt automation to be proactive and timely in dealing with upcoming renewals
• Leverage health scores, renewal process tracking, and success plans (where relevant) to
prioritize resources on the accounts that can result in the largest impact for your effort
• Create forecasts on a consistent suite of reports and indicators of risk
The Strategy

• Drive increased retention by executing the most effective
processes for closing your renewals
• Increase revenue by prioritizing resources on the highest impact
(for effort) renewals
• Provide cross-functional visibility on customers
• Greater visibility of expected and forecast renewals and revenue
The Impact

Stakeholder Alignment
SaStakeholder
Alignment
8

Impact
Retention
Expansion
SA Element Overview
Gainsight Strategy
Nurture relationships between
customers’ executives and your
management, to uncover their
goals and reinforce your value
The Stakeholder Alignment Element will help you build and maintain stronger
relationships with customer executives, thereby increasing retention (and potentially
expansion)
Pain Point
Customer decision makers
don’t value the impact
we’re making, leading to
downsell and churn

The customer’s executive decision makers are distant third parties
• Their needs and objectives change frequently, so we find ourselves
investing time and effort in strategies that are out-of-date
• When we only contact them personally around the time of the
renewal (even if we’ve been working with people on their team),
they feel that we see them only as buyers, not that we care about
their success
• They don’t appreciate progress that we’re making, or what value it
will add, leading to churn
The Pain

Implement processes that personally engage your customers’
executive decision makers
• Identify decision makers consistently
• Match them with ‘buddies’ from your management, who are
accountable for maintaining the relationship
• Engage them with calls and emails with their ‘buddy’, which are
valuable for them personally, uncover their current objectives,
and reinforce outcomes being delivered
• Use automation to create a consistent and scalable process
The Strategy

• You build and maintain strong relationships with
executive decision makers
• These key stakeholders value you as a thought partner
and understand the value you add to their business
• Your efforts align with the customer’s strategic priorities
• These factors drive improved retention and expansion
The Impact

Elements Definition Series
Advocate Engagement
Ae
12
Advocate
Engagement

Pain Point
It’s a struggle to engage our
successful customers in driving
new business through
references or advocating for us
Gainsight Strategy
Create systems that routinely
identify advocates, mobilize
them to participate in activities
that fuel growth, and track their
participation
AE Element Overview
Impact
New Business
Expansion
Retention
In the Advocate Engagement Element, you will mobilize advocates and keep track of
advocacy events such as sales reference calls, webinar participation, and speaking
engagements

It’s a struggle to engage our successful customers in driving new
business through references or advocating for us
• It’s time-consuming to identify and coordinate references, which
slows down sales
• We don’t know how much pipeline our advocates influence
• CSMs never quite get around to fostering advocacy
• We struggle to find customer speakers for events and webinars,
resulting in last-minute fire drills
• Our main advocates are fatigued with all of our requests for their
help
The Pain

Create systems that routinely identify advocates, mobilize them to
participate in activities that fuel growth, and track their participation
• Identify advocates through your Experience Management (CX) and
Customer Health (CH) Elements
• Engage new advocates with a digitally-assisted case study process
• Mobilize advocates through CTAs & Playbooks for sales reference
calls, webinar participation, speaking engagements, and more
• Track impact through Reports & Dashboards
The Strategy

• More advocates identified
• Greater volume of advocate activity
• Faster and more appropriate references
• Improved retention and expansion
The Impact

Dan Steinman
GM Gainsight EMEA
Easton Taylor
Director of Customer
Success, EMEA
Kevin Shirley
Director of Sales, EMEA
Making Customer Success a
Company-Wide Initiative

Customer Success - Why and How of Gainsight's 14 Elements

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